8 Bernard Williams Quotes

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"Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams", Fellow of the British Academy/FBA was an English Ethics/moral philosopher, described by The Times as the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time." His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.

As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Ancient Greek philosophy/Greeks. Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientism, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism, calling the "morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists" "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.